Perhaps Donald Trump’s belief that trade should be “balanced” between nations helps explain his acceptance of a gift Qatari jet. No one sells the world more airplanes than the U.S., after all, and it’s time the no-good losers in other countries gave something back.
All right, that would be an idiotic view on trade but not much stupider than the attitudes toward free markets found in various subspecies of the American right, as I surveyed in my prior column. (Though as “bribes” go, I wouldn’t worry too much about a highly visible jet meant for governmental use. A president can rustle up jets from the military any time he pleases. I’d worry more about politicians receiving small, unseen things they normally can’t easily acquire—not that I think politicians deserve any gifts at all, nor salaries, nor power, nor legal slack.)
But since people have short memories, each time you show them that one wing of the political spectrum (last week, the right) is stupid or ineffectual, they tend just to switch valences and embrace the opposite wing, so this week let’s survey the half dozen left-leaning factions in American politics to remind ourselves they are and were completely awful on the issue of free trade long before Trump made his own recent terrible moves on trade such as imposing tariffs, which are by definition taxes on goods that individuals, who should be free, want to buy and sell across national borders.
I wrote that the right has roughly six factions—philosophically, if not of equal size demographically—in order of decreasing rightwardness, Trumpers (whether you think of them as nationalists, populists, or moderate fascists), paleoconservatives, reformicons, radical/paleolibertarians, mainstream libertarians, and neoconservatives (and I think what the world really needs is something in between the paleolibertarians and the mainstream libertarians, but give me some credit for not trying to shoehorn an explicit mention of my own tiny faction—the immigration-friendly subset of anarcho-capitalists—into that spot in last week’s model).
Before I list the half-dozen left factions that oppose those half-dozen right-leaning factions, as if political philosophy weren’t wondrously diverse enough already, I’ll acknowledge there are genuine centrists and moderates in between. Contrary to popular conceptions and fears of extremists, though, I’d warn that centrist territory is where the mundane authoritarians who really dominate day-to-day politics usually dwell, with big, expensive institutions such as the military, Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Reserve, and countless boring-sounding public-private partnerships tending to have roughly equal numbers of Republican and Democrat supporters. It’s the stuff too bland to have noisy fights over that endures, consumes trillions of dollars, and escapes budget cuts like the ones recommended by D.O.G.E. (More pleasant phenomena in the center, though, include things like the swing-vote-organizing, libertarian-influenced Independent Center, but I care more about what people think than about how to game the voting system.)
The half-dozen left-leaning factions, I’d say, are roughly speaking and in order of increasing leftwardness: the neoliberals, the government “establishment” in most developed nations, left-liberals, leftists, left-anarchists, and greens. As with the right, each is in some way hostile or tepid toward international trade, so Trump isn’t unique in this regard.
The neoliberals love mercantilist management of trade, and they were constantly adjusting tariff rates and labor, environmental, or human rights-related caveats to international trade agreements for decades before Trump came along, not to mention trying to get nations to set their taxes via multilateral treaties in the hopes of “harmonizing” tax rates—and not necessarily in a lower direction, despite that hope always being dangled before the world’s consumers. The Clintonites loved the idea of government setting pharmaceutical prices, signing pharmaceutical treaties, and tampering with insurance markets long before this week’s Trump decrees on pharma prices (to the sorrow of my old colleagues at the libertarian-leaning American Council on Science and Health). Paul Krugman found himself at odds with his fellow neoliberals—and likely got passed over for a Bill Clinton Cabinet position—for having the audacity to tell Clinton that “trade deficits” don’t really matter. That speaks unusually well of Krugman (defending international trade is what got him his Nobel) but not so well of the control-freak neoliberal faction of which he’s very much a part. Most of them would happily use government to tell Japan how many cars it can sell rather than just sit back and let the market decide.
The broader liberal “establishment,” ensconced in the governments of most developed nations including those of Western Europe, is if anything even more eager to boss around companies and customers than U.S. neoliberals are. They just don’t always have the same clout as the U.S. We should pity those nations when Trump tries to impose higher tariffs on them—it’s the buyers and sellers of all nations who suffer, not the jerks in government—but it’s also true that most of them believe the basic (wrong) idea that government should decide how much trade to allow. Mercantilism is socialistic thinking applied to capitalist-looking targets, and it’s always a net harm. At the same time, it’s now imperative to note that some of what Trump alleges are the high tariffs imposed by those other countries are actually just their natural, market-spawned trade surpluses with us—because we like buying things from them. Trying to punish places because we like buying from them is insane, like punching your local grocer in the face every time he sells you something—and to add insult to injury, expecting your relationship to continue, as if you are still a good ally.
Left-liberals are more open than neoliberals about taking a negative view of profits, layoffs, “greed,” price fluctuations, and other routine aspects of imperfect and ever-changing markets. They dominate the Democratic Party and shouldn’t be expected for a moment to rescue us from Trump’s economic ignorance. I was wondering when the Democrats, who’ve been pretending for the past few weeks to be horrified by tariffs in general, would make matters worse by saying they actually like tariffs and just have some quibbles with the way Trump’s imposing them. Sure enough, millennial Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) was first out of the gate with a post saying Democrats can work with Trump because tariffs and trade barriers aren’t per se bad. I’m sure it’s just coincidence he serves the auto-union-dominated suburbs of Pittsburgh. For its part, Slate.com went from praising Biden’s tariffs to condemning Trump’s, but you can be assured it’ll go back to defending tariffs when a Democrat’s imposing them again.
True leftists, our fourth left-leaning faction, make little pretense of respecting free-market norms. If they offer a bundle of legislative measures that includes some liberty-compatible elements, it’s a safe bet those parts will drop out during negotiations, just as budget cuts tend to vanish from Republican bills that bundle increases and decreases in spending. And the public (encouraged by media propaganda) will almost always conclude, if small cuts and onerous new regulations happen simultaneously, that the cuts were the harmful part, not the controls. But who among the true leftists really cares about the costs and benefits of trade, whether on the international or interpersonal scale? Vaguer concepts such as “equality” and “privilege-checking” override all in the minds of these petty potentates. With endless help from academia, they devise many open-ended, abstract excuses for imposing on us whatever new rules they please. And if Trump really added Canada to the U.S., it’d just give the left an overwhelming, sudden electoral advantage in this country, which is exactly the sort of effect he’s presumably trying to ward off most of the time when he condemns “globalism.” Import goods, not more lefty politics. The man’s insane.
Left-anarchists get called insane for other reasons: They hate capitalism in general and global trade in particular. But I’ll grant them this much, they tend to like very local, endearingly informal political arrangements, whether it’s a commune, “intentional community,” or squat, so they probably won’t be trying to annex Canada or conquer Greenland any time soon. Unfortunately, they see only the downsides of international trade and so have no qualms about protesting against container ships, blocking traffic, or demanding that the governments they claim not to condone impose more stringent labor regulations in their international trade agreements. If the anarchist ideal is a smashing of international commerce that leaves each family (or individual, since they usually want to abolish things as old-fashioned as families) raising its own food and trying to craft its own lightbulbs, they’ll have caused the biggest increase in poverty and human suffering since the dawn of civilization.
Sixth, last, and farthest left, much as the greens may sound like fuzzy friends to the animals, let it never be forgotten that environmentalism’s a colossal scam. Not only does it routinely impede trade by lambasting jet exhaust, smokestacks, and other aspects of industrial civilization that make trade and our very high historic standard of living possible, environmentalism also constantly pulls extremist rhetorical tricks like declaring each continent hotter than average, albeit in separate headlines so that each potential constituency has its chance to be alarmed about climate change. Having whipped the public into a paranoid frenzy by such chicanery, the greens then do disastrous things such as banning useful chemicals, including for several decades the mosquito-killing substance DDT, fostering the spread of mosquito-borne malaria, especially in Africa, and thus likely killing more people in the late-20th century than the Nazis did in mid-century. Scratch an earth-loving hippie chick, in other words, find a goddam serial killer, and a sanctimonious one at that. (It’s not shocking that the founder of Earth Day murdered and composted his girlfriend.)
But sometimes, ironically, the misanthropic nature-lovers at the left end of the political spectrum sound not wholly unlike the nature-flouting tech bros currently influencing the right, with their robotic post-human visions. Sitting at the intersection of that Venn Diagram for now, of course, wearing a quasi-libertarian fig leaf but touting his green electric cars when not touting eugenics-like right-wing notions, is the outgoing D.O.G.E. head and presidential advisor Elon Musk, a reminder that futuristic tech may soon enough render all 12-or-so of the political factions I’ve enumerated over the past couple of weeks largely irrelevant. If so, we may come to miss the old, human tribal squabbling as surely as we sometimes miss the primeval forest.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey